For Bears To Dance To

By Tom Morrison

Set on the eve of the last Great Market Crash, this is the story of Wilton X, a young stockbroker with MLPF&S, the acronym of his mentors. Fused by greed and fear, the world of securities constructs endless Walls of Worry and Slopes of Hope for their clients who grow more distracted every day. Here, Wilton pursues the most beautiful bankrupt orphan ever marketed and, already possessing health and height, he finds wealth, love, and himself.

The title FOR BEARS TO DANCE TO comes from Flaubert's Madame Bovary - "Words are the broken drums on which men beat tunes for bears to dance to when they long to move the stars to pity." It is the stock market bears who dance to Wilton's tunes before the Crash about to be visited on them, while their counterparts, the stock market bulls, go to inventive ruin.

Literary footnote:
The novel is a Spanish picaresque in which sub-plots germinate. El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. It is a German Bildungsroman, as well, where the central character gains craft. Die Leiden des jungen Werther. And, of course, an American Guide Book. Huckleberry Finn, Catch-22. It is designed to assure every Master-Of-The-Universe that there is always a short cut...close, nearby, over the rise. Soon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tom Morrison
• Release date: Jul 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476297187

Tom Morrison

Entrepreneur and antiquarian, over-schooled and under-educated, polyglot, grammatically challenged in four languages, pedant in one. At the barricades since birth in a St. Louis Catholic orphanage. Schools, war enlistee, universities. Uncultivated amateur expatriate in France, Austria, Germany and Spain with an extended coda in Malibu. Self-indulgent. Only ambition...writing, making money in the shortest time possible, and causing no pain in the parade. Loves Vermeer. France. Flaubert. Ibiza. Heller. Collects 18th and 19th century Ninos Jesus, same periods polychrome wood sculpture of Saints, and antique Yoruba Ibejis. P.S. Aims to delete modifiers attached to innocent nouns or verbs. Friend of Fowler. A challenge to be funny on a verbal diet.

Book preview

BOOK 1

1970

"Bulls make money; bears make money;

only pigs get slaughtered in the stock market!"

Wall Street aphorism

The more he seduced, the more came of their own accord, for one word swept through the brokerage and beyond. Moolah! The news built a mountain of confirmation slips on his desk high enough to promote the manager of the branch bank next door for proximity. Wilton’s into money! In appreciation the lady sent over a gross of gift novelty pens that clothed a naked investor by tipping her upside down.

Alerted to suspicious activity in the stock market—pigs are making money!—the FBI sent an operative to check him out. It was early days, however, and the man did well, swiftly earning enough in the O-T-C market to buy walnut groves in the San Joachim Valley, allowing him to submit a favorable report with his resignation, and a bushel of mixed nuts. Unlike the FBI agent, Wilton’s colleagues were tired of tipping pens. They were sick of giving misinformation to the indigents who haunted the board room to keep warm and feel a little less lonely. They longed to be investigated too, and phoned Russian agents listed in the Redwood telephone book, offering to sabotage the system from the inside for just enough to keep up their payments at the branch bank. Too late.

Too late. Wilton had all the customers who really sincerely wanted to be rich, and every one of them insisted their trades be handled by Wilton. Every day more investors appeared, many more than he could help and more flooded in, teaching him to hurt them instead. Hurt took less time than help and they were more grateful. Devoted to Wilton’s welfare, they brought him their relatives. Playing no favorites, he lost their savings too, but earned their love. Looking him straight in the tie, they knew he was a friend for life the way he held their hand an extra moment the morning they learned of their ruin, and really cared in the little time they had for him from then on, which grew less each day. He was all heart and they invited themselves to the free investment classes he gave every Thursday night after The Fugitive to attract new customers for them to lie to, expounding their investment philosophy. They were so grateful for all the attention and the opportunity to fantasy wealth aloud that they did not resent their losses.

Wilton waded in Adam Smith. He wandered through Charles Dow. He walked like Graham and Dodd, twin stars in the galaxy. When he warned investors not to put their faith in tips or insider information, they listened. He quoted Keynes—‘those were mere bubbles on the stream’—and offered them sound knowledge instead, and that rare strength of character which only intelligence and adversity to loss can forge. Over and over again he charted the rise of young corporations, watching the tiny X’s build—shoulders—head—flag—two flags—three flags—rising on increasing volume with resistance levels penetrated time and again as the prices rocketed up the page. Wilton watched them, a professional contortion of disgust on his face at the values given untested issues by ignorant unprincipled speculators.

Apprentices in the stock market, eager to bank a bundle and retire from the business they loved, observed him. Then they fled to the men’s room where they lined up to take turns in front of the mirror contorting their faces in professional grimaces of dismay and disgust. Hours later, lined and haggard and more uncertain than before, they fled back to Wilton’s desk to infiltrate the crowd waiting instruction. He praised them all on their efforts to create an investment visage and said, Stay firm. And they stood firm. Firm until the youngest of the unseasoned companies for which they had learned unbridled contempt hit its peak, the shares trading for the highest P/E multiple known since Dutch flame tulip bulbs.

Rattling the financial press, his investors clamored for action. Using fundamental analysis, The Wall Street Journal calculated there were nine chances in four to make a packet. After tapping the Gompertz Curve like a barometer, the technicians at Barrons estimated there was every chance in infinity to make a bundle. And Woman’s Wear, catholic as ever and more bullish than the rest, headlined, Buy, bubi, buy! begging no one to let such a bargain escape. Buy, bubi, buy! everyone cried, no longer willing to stand firm.

Wilton stared, baffled that they would not follow his lead and draw harmless charts. Fearing they would trash the stock shop, however, he snapped up the incredible never to be repeated bargain. Steadily it declined as he continued to place orders, averaging their purchase price down to bargain new 52 week lows as all the customers chortled triumphantly, dug one another in the ribs, and felt better until the company had its corporate seal repossessed and declared bankruptcy, having lost its only business machine and single tangible asset. From zero there was no way to average down further.

Those buyers who clamored loudest blinked at one another like moles emerged to a shocking light and stumbled for the street door. Blindly they pushed through the cheery clutch of pensioners who refused to abandon Wilton while he was on top, or their seats in the back where they could swap symptoms and the names of doctors who gave kickbacks on Medicare.

The ruined investors tottered into the sun, feeling its warm rays on their cheeks for the first time since they attended a free lecture. Most caught their breath and ran off, determined to make new stacks of money for Wilton to work his magic on. Those few losers whose pains were too permanent to return to the market had the satisfaction along with the rest of owning a piece of America, for several weeks later manila envelopes arrived, enclosing their own personal share certificates of the defunct corporation. And an invoice for the printing cost.

MARKET LORE

"Buy on the cannons:

sell on the bugles."

Nathan Rothschild

Wilton’s affinity for fresh corporations went public, and throughout the Bay Area he became a barometer of inverse activity as valid as hemlines. On Russian Hill, on Nob Hill, wherever lateral thinkers went home to late lunches, a telephone call sent them scrambling, slashing mattresses, shattering piggy banks, holding children upside down till they turned red and every penny bounced on the carpet.

Dh.W Corporation, Wilton’s latest discovery, drove them wild to invest with or against him. Rings, tiaras, gold tooth picks, whatever the pawnshop would not accept, went to melt. Second, third and fourth mortgages floated over all real estate. Analyst’s couches grew thick layers of dust, for no neurotic with assets wasted money on sanity. Tots in the pediatric ward were pried out of their iron lungs and wheezed home by bus, the family station wagon having been leased as an ambulance to a Sausalito cactus clinic. Brain, heart and gizzard surgeons sent illustrations of their specialties to a random sample of Republican hypochondriacs, allowing a big twenty-five percent discount for prepayments received before the Pacific Exchange Friday closing. Banks were robbed by respectable men wearing ski-masks and handball gloves, divorces and abortions postponed, life savings embezzled, and one unscrupulous gang of commodity traders spent their lunch hours mugging widows in a Jewish memorial rose garden.

Investors learned that Dh.W stood for Dehydrated Water. The company had perfected an ingenious plastic bag with Dh.W Corp. neatly embossed on the back or front. Wherever. All the downed airman, shipwrecked sailor, or desert traveler had to do was unscrew the snug cap, pour in H2O additive, filling it right up to the top, and drink.

Dehydrated Water saves lives, Wilton told everybody, euphoric about the discovery. And all they had to do was drink.

Drink? everybody cried. Water? Sheesh! They demanded instead, Buy, bubi! Buy!

Wilton began to buy, and hundreds of thousands of shorts, strips, straps, straddles and spreads inundated the lone market specialist condemned by his rich Uncle Fred to handle Dh.W Corp. He had handled two block trades in the issue the previous year when the Secretary-Treasurer of the company unloaded to finance her divorce. The shares were snapped up by her bargain hunting husband, the company’s President.

Six months later he had to dump double on the market to finance the settlement and they were reacquired by the Secretary Treasurer, bargain hunting. The specialist made both trades effortlessly. But then the wires began to hum and his telephone leapt off its cradle, animating motes over the desk. Hurriedly he had Uncle Fred pull strings and suspend trading, poured himself a drink of Jack Daniel’s and Dh.W additive, and screamed incomprehensible oaths at the speech impediment that made him unfit for the aluminum siding business. He rushed out of the exchange and grabbed a taxi. When he failed the glibness test again, learning he was still unfit for aluminum siding, there was nothing left but to trudge back to the trading floor and match buyers and sellers as best he could for the rest of the day.

Eventually the last sale had been made that could be made. Every authorized share of Dh.W had been printed and sold for the highest possible commission and tax—plus price. There was no one left in the water short world with a share in Dh.W who was not a customer of Wilton. They owned them all and would never sell them—tucked away safely in their portfolios—for they were long-term buy-and-hold investors not speculators. Never. For a brief time their satisfaction was a low pleasant hum of well-being accompanied by an amused glint of contempt for all without Dh.W. As the hum abated, the satisfaction died. There were no buyers hammering on the door of their dream, clamoring for Dh.W which could be denied them for anything less than a king’s ransom. No one appeared with a king’s ransom. In fact no one wanted Dh.W at any price, and anxiety turned to frenzy. It was worse than entering the den of your condo to find a fire snapping cheerfully, yourself already there sprawled in the old Eames chair—pipe, slippers, Barrons in place—a croupier’s rake thrust through your heart. Panic!

All the confident investors turned cowardly speculators at once, discovering there was no one in the well-watered world to bail them out. And the harried specialist in New York wired applications to aluminum siding distributors in Bratislava, Somaliland, the Hindu Kush, begging employment. Silence. A new crease of worry etched itself permanently over his brow, allowing market phrenologists to identify the Wilton line above the bump of Mercurio, Sicilian god of commerce and the Mafia.

While all those who opposed him did not make a fortune, all who followed Wilton lost their all, and always at the moment when success was certain, but they had no more chips and were dealt out. In his M.L.P.F. & S. hyena-skin attaché case Wilton carried small explicit charts with gothic lines straining to the top of the page, with many squiggles and squirms and lively dollar signs spread liberally about because they looked so nice there.

Wouldn’t you really rather be a millionaire? he asked bashful cash types who wandered in, and offered, One point over LIBOR?

During the entire time, registered envelopes arrived to Wilton’s desk. He peeked inside each and sent them to his safe deposit box in the branch bank next door. If the market operation was brief, the envelopes arrived hourly. But in those rare cases where distribution lagged, so did the envelopes, and when they stopped altogether, it was better than a burning bush or a mysterious voice in the thunder, commanding Wilton to unearth a new once-in-a-lifetime marvel for the retail trade.

‘Buy, bubi! Buy!’ paid well, and the better he was paid, the more his credibility rose. At the end of his brief career so many people believed him that a few lucky clients left the country, fearing the new values in vogue. They enrolled in Zen archery classes in Nagasaki, preserving their capital, and becoming good men deadly at fifty paces. Lesser men blanched at the legends of Wilton’s probity, and chose another profession, retraining as pet walkers. Wilton was a force for good and gave investment sermons wherever a mount was constructed of new issue prospecti, a pair of shorted desk computers booming an accompaniment more soothing than organs. The Mutual Fund Smile Committee stopped the Girl Scout brownie campaign and financed a Wilton lookalike on local television instead. Reverend B. Graham called from the oval office to ask whether White House prayer breakfasts could be franchised to finance President Nixon’s re-election campaign.

Such skills could not be taught, of course, but they were observed throughout the trade. When some astute fledgling broker brought a client down to crashing ruin, he was pointed out as a comer and given higher rank. In particularly creative undetected churnings, an engraved invitation good for one visit to the executive toilet was presented in an emotional ceremony. And later, from one elegant monogrammed booth to another, the opinion flew that young Raunchy did a real Wilton today, and sighs of envious agreement went up from the many small partitions, with a gush of plumbing.

WILTON I

He was born and brazed on an eroded clay farm near Anniston, Alabama. His father sharecropped the back forty and the front quarter for a local butcher who had swapped for the place with five Poland China show sows he stole from his wife who had slopped them for years to get rich enough to leave him. Wilton’s father worked the back and front but on the sides squatted two families of urban Cherokee who homesteaded the sacred burial ground of their ancestors to ready it for subdivision. Their big city children made life intolerable for little Wilton, grabbing his hair and cutting it off in ethnic exercises, burning down his fort whenever he forgetfully rebuilt it. They hated him because he did not look like a real red American and did not have a sullen expression in his repertoire. Never trust a fucking foreigner!

Nigger! the children shouted and shot flinttipped mail-order arrows at little Wilton on his way to school, teaching him to duck and run. Monkey!

Wilton’s father wrote the family name three times in his life. The first time was the hot day he met a friendly plump young girl with brown eyes and braids he found waddling along the roadside and gave a lift to town. He liked the green flecks that sparkled in her eyes, and with the abandon of a big spender, he bought her Kool-Aids, convincing her to visit a motel after she gulped down her twelfth, and to do it with him. Then he proposed an hour later, dazed by his first experience on a bed. Without hesitation he scrawled his X for the Justice of the Peace.

Wilton was born four and a half months later. Bewildered, his father scratched a less confident X again, this time in the Registry of Births at the County Courthouse, and tried to pay the ninety cent registration fee with four dimes and a nickel. He was illiterate, but he could count. A reduction was in order. She warn’t pregnant but half from me, he fingered.

The County Clerk, who was also the Justice of the Peace, hated to dicker with an old customer. Finally, to help out, he abandoned the cash and accepted the new father’s battered dollar pocket watch instead, asking, What the hell else is a friend for?

* * *

The last time he got to write the family name was a few years after Wilton was baptized by the local Total Immersion Baptist Minister, who had a lien on their mule and performed inept abortions when he was not fulfilling his official duties as Justice of the Peace and County Recording Clerk, exorcising ghosts, or foreclosing on overdue animals.

Wilton’s mother, a lapsed Catholic who felt as bruised by life as a fallen angel, claimed her son had no business as a dunked Baptist. She felt her world falling apart, and dated the collapse to the night she got loved up by a dark traveling medicine man, and quit the farm four and half months too late to look for an abortionist. She could not stand having her handsome dark son baptized in a pagan rite, and became a Kool-Aid freak to teach her husband a lesson. Soon she gained so much weight drinking Kool-Aid day and night she could not stand at all. She taught him a really good lesson not long after and died.

He never picked up another hitchhiker as long as he lived. But he signed the death certificate with a crabbed laborious X, little like the other two times before, right on the line pointed out to him by the Coroner, Justice of the Peace, County Recording Clerk, dunking Baptist Minister, closest only family friend, and Grave Digger, who, when he left with the body, took the mule along too. It cost a lot to give a loved one the right send-off and Wilton’s father wanted to do what was right.

He hugged the little boy in his scrawny arms to comfort himself for the loss of the mule as they watched the sun set over the raw red clay hills. The lonely father wanted to protect them both from a malignant world that seemed to have it in for him. He concluded sex was the hand maiden of Satan because he never got a hand on her or any other woman except the time he picked up the pregnant hitchhiker with green flecked brown eyes, braids, and a taste for sweet drinks. That turned out pretty bad and dampened his ardor for love too. He badmouthed them both daily, trying to raise Wilton to be a dutiful boy. He tried to teach him right from what everybody else in the world did to make him able to continue the family tradition for failure, asking only one thing, and making him swear to remember.

Leave your mark, he said, tapping the boy on the temple. You’re a X.

WILTON II

He was seventeen when he discovered the Prince Henry the Navigator cigar box in which the family papers were stored and the savings banked. His father was out visiting the mule he still missed every sundown. After reading a letter addressed to him from his mother—so dimly remembered—once; again; three times—he took half the cash but left the blue chip stamp books the old man was saving to recover the mule one day. Wilton scribbled a note saying he was going to make something of himself. Somehow—anyhow—and would pay the loan back as soon as he did.

Wilton’s note was meaningless, of course, for Old Man X could barely read the hour hand on the pocket watch dial whose loss he mourned second to the mule he had just visited. He took the note and shuffled next door to the only educated man he knew, the Cherokee’s wife who was a Bennington graduate. It was bad luck and typically rotten timing, for he passed between a steel-tipped big game hunting arrow and the straw bale for which it was intended. There was nothing for the young bowman to do but recover his arrow and bury Old Man X under the nearest cornfield, plowing the land and seeding a second crop to take advantage of the unexpected nutrients.

Wilton learned of the accident much later, for the first letter he wrote home was returned unopened, the flap decorated by a scroll of delicate obscenities in the Cherokee alphabet invented by Sequoya, promising to lift your fucking hair damn soon. The many others he wrote while drifting and working through three universities were not returned at all. During those years he lost his father, his innocence, and his accent, but he found his way.

With two degrees in his pocket and a letter of introduction to the San Francisco branch manager of the investment firm, Mint, Lunch, Paunch, Fawn and Smile—M.L.P.F. & S. for short—he found himself employed to sweep up, race to the corner deli for pastrami and pickles on sour dough, sew buttons back on account executive’s coats—buttons torn off by crazed losers—and serve as a movable pin for office golfers eager to improve their approach shots. In his spare time he read all the texts on investment and finance that no one else could understand either. The other apprentice hired the same month as Wilton quit in disgust, revolted by the prose style, and went to work as advance man for a conglomerate of Oglala Sioux food faddists seeking to spread the benefits of roast dog in the Pacific west. Wilton, however, hung on, determined to succeed, waiting his chance.

Being rare, talent is unmistakable in the brokerage business, and soon customers sidled up to him as he sat on his three legged wooden apprentice stool in a corner sewing jacket buttons on that they had just ripped off. They complimented him on his needlework, checked shiftily to make sure no one else was listening, and asked for a tip. They desperately needed a real live wild inside hot one to stem the tide of losses that were driving them back to the world of work. In those early days, Wilton’s advice was sound, for he had time to read and think, but he was a flunky. He sat on a three legged stool. He did not possess a company attaché case covered in hyena-skin. He did not wear a coat with buttons torn off in proof of competence nor treat them with the contempt for which they yearned to complain.

No one ever acted on his advice, and while the companies he told them to buy doubled and trebled and split ten for one and declared extra dividends for breakfast on earnings discovered the night before, they winked at him and muttered to one another.

Getta looka the smartass!

Did he ever tout me ona dog!

Me too.

You too?

Sheesh! they all agreed.

Wilton feared he would sit until he exploded the hard stool on the office manager’s thick skull, but then Paunch, the first executive Vice-President of the firm appeared. He was on a gourmet visit to check out a Bay Area restaurant specializing in ulcers and other sea delicacies. Paunch staggered past, returning from his tenth tea break of the afternoon to the top executive men’s room, clutching a plain brown paper sack for company. He heard mumbling and lurched closer to hear, being much given to mumbling himself. Through the blur, he saw Wilton busy giving practice investment advice to a small gray house spider busy gift wrapping a fly in the corner. Paunch leaned down to listen, lost his balance, and dropped the paper sack, shattering the Jack Daniel’s bottle on the floor. He lost his temper too, and began jumping up and down on the spider for making him look like a lush. Before he could follow the spider into her hole, Paunch was carried off by the two huge mute male nurses assigned to accompany him everywhere he staggered except the top executive men’s